Carri Kemp busy at work on canning day at Cannery Brewing on Feb. 27 for the limited release Ceres hazy IPA. The beer is being released on International Women’s Day on Mar. 8. Jordyn Thomson - Western News

Penticton’s Cannery Brewing celebrates women with new brew

In honour of International Women’s Day the popular brewery is releasing a new beer

Cannery Brewing has been working on something special for the upcoming International Women’s Day on Mar. 8.

The brewery took advantage of a special hop blend provided by Yakima Chief Hops to create a limited release hazy IPA named Ceres, after the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain. Yakima Chief Hops offered the blend to be used as a collaboration for the Pink Boots Society Collaboration Brew Day.

“When the hops became available, we thought this would be a great thing for us to do this year. We’ve really expanded our team in the last couple of years, we have a lot of women working in the brewery now,” said Kim Lawton, marketing director with Cannery Brewing. “We thought this would be a really cool way to have all the women of Cannery Brewing be involved and be a part of this.”

Once the beer is launched, a portion of the proceeds will go to the Pink Boots Society, which helps women achieve success in the beer industry. Lawton said the team got together to brew the limited edition beer three weeks ago and it was a fun learning experience for the women who had not previously helped with brewing.

Kim Lawton feels the heat on brewing day for the Ceres hazy IPA from Cannery Brewing. Image from Facebook

“It’s cool to be a part of something like that. That’s the basis of this whole business and it’s nice to be a part of that,” said Ellie Farley, one of the Cannery Brewing women that helped create this beer. “I’ve seen the guys brew in the big vats before but I never realized how difficult it is to stir the mash.”

“It was really cool to be on the other side of things and see how the beer gets made,” said Jill Hart, another Cannery employee who helped with this project. “We serve it, we taste it, but we don’t always get to see everything that’s going on back there.”

Jill Hart is no stranger to cleaning out the vats so she was more than ready to help with the brewing of the Ceres hazy IPA at Cannery Brewing. Image from Facebook

The name was suggested by staff at the brewery in the weeks leading up to the canning day, and Super Deluxe Creative took over designing what the label would end up looking like.

“When they approached us with the idea of doing a beer for the Pink Boots Society and International Women’s Day, obviously (we decided) this label has to be very, very bright pink,” said Skyler Punnett, art director with Super Deluxe Creative.

Punnett explained that the pig featured on the label alongside Ceres is an homage to the tradition of sacrificing sows to the Greek goddess. He and Paul Higgins, creative director with Super Deluxe Creative, decided to represent Ceres in a traditional form based on her depictions in statues.

Lawton said thanks to the help of Super Deluxe Creative and Westkey Graphics, who printed the labels, the brewery can make a larger contribution from the batch sales towards the Pink Boots Society.

While they did not have an exact number of how many cases of the beer they’d have available, Lawton said they printed 6,000 labels and it is “sure to sell out very quickly”.